


Battlefields Much Beloved

by MostlyAnon



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, Soldier Imagery Overload, vague smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-13
Updated: 2012-06-13
Packaged: 2017-11-07 16:23:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/433123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MostlyAnon/pseuds/MostlyAnon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are softer women and better men.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Battlefields Much Beloved

She is a soldier born and thorough in her duty.

 

It is never quiet and never calm. War rushes ever closer, threatening to consume them all and she is the only levee before the flood. Seconds fall like thunderstorms. Entire battles are won or lost depending on her actions and she treats every mission accordingly. 

 

Time and death and stress take their tolls. She was young once, but wears her age now.

 

“There are softer women,” she observes, stretched in the embrace of a frozen moment. The distance between Cerberus and the Earth is vast, wider than just lightyears, but it offers her peace-- or he does.

 

Garrus’ voice rumbles up her spine like the Normandy’s drives kicking in, steals stress from her shoulders. He presses the flat side of his face to her thigh, strokes up to catch the edge of her lace in his teeth.

 

“Would you like me to find you one?” he asks, politely; his C-Sec voice, all business, and it sounds so unlike him that she laughs. She rests the arch of her foot on the curve of his cowl, runs it down the rough skin, relishing the contrast. 

 

Lace rips, falls, forgotten. His mouth traces up, along the carved sharp lines of her hips, the indention of her stomach--

 

“Too many missed meals, Shepard,” he admonishes, exhaling against her navel. 

 

\--and further still, the tips of his fringe scraping along the vulnerable undersides of her breasts. He is not a creature of excess, but of spartan sensibilities-- there is no part of him wasted when it comes to exploring her.

 

When he rolls his head, lifts his mouth to nip at the small marks left on the dusk side of her breasts, she arches up into the touch; he rewards her with firm contact, the sharp edge of his teeth, brief, shocking, and all the more stark for the hair-trigger touch that follows.

 

“There are harder women,” she tries, again, thinking of the way his eyes lingered on the Citadel, watching Asari Commandos.

 

Her eyes had lingered, too; perhaps it was better not to dwell on it.

 

He lifts his head, tilts it to the side. “Good point,” he concedes and rises off the bed.

 

For a second, he has her, his wicked sharp wit sneaking behind her for the kill. Her laughter twines around his own when she lunges off the bed to drag him back.

 

His eyes are sharp with amusement when she pushes him down, throws a leg over his hips, and splays her hands across his chest. Loose, her hair is fierce, frames face beloved. He reaches up and feels the silken strands snag on the calluses of his hands, slide through as easily as a bullet to the brain.

 

She smells of lust, of long missions that drive their bodies beyond breaking, turn them from coal to diamond. She smells of the Normandy, of human and asari and krogan and quarian and turian and salarian, of machinery grease, of gun oil and armor wax. She smells of woman, of Shepard, of need and passion pure.

 

Her lips are soft against his neck and he exhales, drags claws light over the scars on her back. His fault, back when her body was a battlefield yet unknown and unexplored. Her laughter, her response-- he wore matching scars, a reward for his stumbled apology, punishment for wasting precious minutes with foolish words.

 

Her body now a battlefield much beloved, his favorite sniping nest, a place of victory uncompromised. Heat and warmth, he doubts there are women harder than she, softer than she. She is cover in a firefight, all encompassing, drawing him deep into her.

 

His claws prick blood to her hips, drag her down, refuse movement. Her protest is wordless, but not weak.

 

She is the moment between waves of enemies, quivering in tension, straining toward the next battle, the next movement. Her body is two and a half pounds pull on a three pound trigger, a breath to release. She is a weapon in his hands, yearning to dance.

 

She is a soldier born, but follows her own orders, moves when she wants to. She is no gun for him to fire, but a grenade to go off when she pleases, and it pleases her to do so, to move over him, ride him like the crest of bloodlust in the middle of a killing field.

 

His snarl is musical, wraps around her and curls her lips; he is not the first to find her passion turned back against him, wielded like knife. She watches as she rides him harder, feeds his frenzy with her own, until he rushes up on her, drags her down beneath him.

 

She is not a woman to docilely accept her fate, to submit; the fight is not fair, but it is not unfavorable-- both of them warriors, they crave the battle as much as the comfort. He drives her down, hammered into the pillowy softness of the bed, and she bucks up, pops her foot against his hip and almost dislodges him before claws wrap around her ankle, pull it up and he uses the leverage to hit deeper.

 

He is exquisitely skilled when it comes to hitting his marks.

 

The world shatters around them like a broken bottle raining glass into unblemished reflecting pools. She comes apart, feels the galaxy reborn in her bones, the dawning of the universe behind her eyes.

 

Time pools like blood on a fresh bandage, their breath and the sound of the engines, a distant shout of victory from the deck below, her aquarium hums and the hamster’s wheel squeaks-- it is never truly quiet, even here, stretched in the embrace of a frozen moment.

 

“There are better men,” he says, wiping a bit of face paint from her cheek.

 

She laughs at the absurdity of that, swipes blue from his face with her thumb, repaints his designs with her own mark. He flares his mandibles at the possessive touch, amuses himself by nipping at her fingertips. 

 

“You can be stripped of your rank for assaulting a superior officer,” she admonishes. “Stop that.”

 

But he is a renegade born, and thorough in his duty.


End file.
